Alimentation des premiers humains (jusqu’à Erectus)

This ASF intake marked a transition from a largely forest dwelling frugivorous lifestyle to a more open rangeland existence and resulted in numerous adaptations, including a rapidly increasing brain size and altered gut structure.

The proportions of different skeletal elements, particularly once-meaty limb bones, and the abundance of stone-tool butchery damage on those bones, indicate that by 1.84 Ma at the FLK Zinj site at Olduvai Gorge, hominins had first access to prey carcasses. Moreover, mortality (age at death) profiles suggest active hunting by early Homo rather than secondary access to scavenged carcasses. Evidently, early Homo was repeatedly transporting meaty portions of large carcasses for delayed consumption and probable food sharing—behaviours characteristic of humans, not apes.

Although cooking has important benefits, it appears that selection for smaller masticatory features in Homo would have been initially made possible by the combination of using stone tools and eating meat.

–

When bigger is not better: The economics of hunting megafauna and its implications for Plio-Pleistocene hunter-gatherers

There is evidence that meat consumption has had an influence on cranial-dental and intestinal morphologic changes, human erect posture, reproductive characteristics, longer lifespan, and maybe most importantly, on brain and intellectual development